But we don't have the full details of the decision yet, right?

Right.

The judge, uh, sealed her opinion for a week or two to allow the two sides to go over anything in there that's confidential business information.

So we don't know her reasoning yet, but for the moment, this is a huge win for Google, uh, and a big loss for the Justice Department.

This is a huge business that Google has dominated, and frankly, where it has created a lot of complaints and ill will from the website publishers that need to use Google's tools to manage the space that they have on their websites and their other digital properties for ads.

What does that tell us about the state of antitrust enforcement?

Well, if you are an antitrust hawk who thinks that to really fix excessive corporate power that you need to break up companies, then this is a huge setback.

There may be other means to achieve that goal, but as far as using antitrust law to dilute power and, and scale the giants back, it's proving hard to do that through antitrust litigation where the government is the plaintiff.

Dave Michaels, who covers corporate law enforcement for the Journal, says personalized pricing is super targeted.

Companies gather up all this information about you.

They have a consumer profile just of you.

They know what you like, they know what you've paid, they know what you browsed, and then they tailor that price to you specifically.

And the, the concern is that the technology will be used to raise prices.

We don't know how many retailers use this kind of technology, but the Federal Trade Commission said last year that it is widespread and that companies are doing this.

So Instacart, for instance, allowed its, um, its retail partners, uh, to use its software to vary prices to different people who put the same items in their shopping carts in different cities.

Dave says it's not totally clear yet how that disclosure will look to people when they're shopping online.

Dave, why is the FTC arguing that YouTube and TikTok don't actually compete with Meta's social media platforms?

Yeah.

The FTC says that those services as well as X, formerly Twitter, are basically entertainment services or they're apps that connect you with your interests.

The FTC says those services are not built on what's called a social graph, meaning they're not built on the relationships that you as a user have with friends and family.

And the FTC says that network of relationships is what is at the heart of the value proposition for Facebook and Instagram, and even WhatsApp, which is a messaging service, but a lot of people use it in a way that they stay in touch with groups of friends or groups of family members within the app.

That's important because if the court agrees with the FTC that the social media market for friends and family just includes the companies that the FTC says it does, then the FTC has a good chance of winning.

But if the social media market is broader and TikTok is part of it, then it will be a lot harder for the FTC to be able to convince the court that Meta has a monopoly today.

And I thought one of the interesting parts was what the Instagram co-founder had to say about the success, or not, of his platform before Meta bought it all those years ago.